G.T. Labs

travel

The Michigan Author’s Workshop

 

I had a great time at the Michigan Author’s Workshop last week, and got a chance to look around Midland — a place I’ve never been — the next morning before heading home. So, some photos!

Midland Center for the Arts
The Venue

The talk took place at the Midland Center for the Arts, a lovely place. My hosts (Helen and Chris) and co-presenter — poet David (D.R.) James — were excellent too.

Seven Saints and Sinners
Watching over me, not helpfully

We had some tech difficulties (“Oh, about that HDMI port we said you could use. It doesn’t actually work!” “Um. Okay?”), but in the end we got a big ol’ TV in there and watched episodes of “The Good Place” instead of my talk.

A saint
Do good sales mean a good presentation? (Maybe? Probably? I hope?)

Not really, but it was a close thing. In the end, I was able to show images — important when talking about comics — and people seemed happy with my discussion of comics storytelling, its tools, and the research process for Hawking. That is, if “book sales > than number of attendees” is a valid measure of happiness, anyway.

It ran late, so I stayed over night and the next morning, before returning home, I visited the Dow Gardens and the Alden B. Dow Home & Studio.

Alden B. Dow exterior
The chimney is built for climbing. (In a less risk-averse age, anyway.)

You can’t take photos inside, so you’ll just have to go see it for yourself. I’d heard about the home for years, so was grateful to get a chance to finally visit. Definitely worth it!

A fine event in a fine mid-Michigan town. Thanks again to Saginaw Valley State University. I’d go again!

 

Ending Hawking

 

Hey, there’s an ARC giveaway of Hawking going on right now! Enter today: https://bit.ly/2ZypPLA

I hope you get one, and in case you do here’s a quick note to say congratulations, thanks, and…we changed the ending. Not much, but enough that you’ll notice the difference between what you’re holding now and what your readers will see in July.

Darwin's Sandwalk(Well, that and the “Hardcover and Full Color Everywhere by Aaron Polk” thing. You’ll love this book in its final form.)

Here’s how that happened: In a television writer’s room there’s a fairly common occurence: someone pitches a plot-twist or a joke, and other writers nod. But if too many nod in agreement and say “right, that’s just what I was thinking” they’ll toss it out and think some more. Why? Because they know they’ve come up with the exact same thing their savvy audience will expect at that point in the story.

Something similar happened to us, and it was brought about by the sad occasion of Hawking’s death. As we revisited our original ending in light of his passing, we realized that what might have worked soon after we first visited Cambridge to meet him** in 2013 was not as good five years later. The imagery that seemed fresh and appropriate then? It no longer did. Our sensitivity reader made this point as well, pushing us further, and we took heed. The result is a closing sequence that’s subtly different from what’s in the ARC.

It’s now more abstract, leaves more to your imagination, and keeps you in Hawking’s mind—in Hawking’s world—for just a little longer. Perhaps even after you close the book.

I hope you enjoy the story, and come back for more on July 2nd!

**And by soon, I mean I came up with the ending, in outline form, while still in England. In fact, I wrote it down in the rain (England, right?) in a tiny notebook while I was on Darwin’s Sandwalk, pictured above. It was a wonderful trip.

Scotland: I visited and I hope you get to visit too

Random notes from a trip to Scotland…

scotland_car.JPG
For Ann Arbor area friends: Driving in Scotland is much like Huron River Drive, but all the time and hillier and curvier and faster and with steeper drop offs on both sides of the road and large trucks coming in from the wrong side just as the road narrows to one lane. And sheep. For hours.
standing_stones.JPG
After a day of seeing amazing feats of Neolithic construction — villages of stone, standing stones of stone, burial mounds of stone, tons of finely honed stone slabs piled on more tons of stoned and finished to near perfection and placed such that they’ve stood for thousands of years — it took four of us three tries before we could cut through our dessert tart using a sharpened stainless steel knife which someone else made, sharpened, and brought to our table.
mash_tun.JPG
We toured a bunch of distilleries, and while this didn’t make us experts in whisky-making, we got well-versed in the process and the generic tour, written from memory and then enhanded with real nouns:
To make whisky you need four kinds of stuff [1]. Grow some of the stuff [2], germinate it, and then stop germinating it by heating. That’s called malting, and you can use other stuff [3] as the heat source if you want.
(Aside: Dry peat, which is basically fetal coal which needs a few million years more gestation, has no scent. It’s the damp peat that you add later that gives the Islay malts their characteristic flavor.)
Now dry and turn the stuff [4], then run it through a thing [5], separating it into husk, grist, and flour. All these parts get mixed with stuff [6] in the mashing stage, and successive washes of varying temperatures extract sugar from the barley. The leftover mash is turned into feed for the approximately 6.022×10^23 sheep and cows in Scotland.
The sugar water that the livestock doesn’t get is the stuff [7], and this heads into washbacks (sometimes made of wood like larch, sometimes metal), and at last, add the stuff [8]. Fermentation begins and, depending on who’s doing it, will last from 40-100 hours. In the process it releases carbon dioxide, and if you stick your head in the washback and take a big sniff you’ll regret it for the next half hour.
At the end of the process you basically have strong beer (7-10% alcohol) which actually tasted more like wine. Up to this point the processes for making beer, wine, and whisky are virtually identical. The difference comes in the next step, where if you do it wrong for beer or wine the end result tastes bad and if you do it wrong for whisky the end result will kill you [9]. Avoid tragedy by running the stuff [10] through the pot and the washback stills successively. These are made of copper and condense out the spirit, and you do this over and over until you get past the foreshots [11] and get to the heart. Carefully monitor the process and draw off the heart, recycling the heads and the tails [12] in later runs to extract all the good stuff. All of this stuff flows through a spirit safe, which is kept under lock and key so nobody can swipe any spirit and sell it without paying taxes.
The fetal whisky now goes into things [13]. The first thing is always made from American bourbon cask oak, charred on the inside first. Then the whisky sits for a minimum of three years, 2% evaporating each year — that 2% is the angel’s share.
(The barrels are monitored closely, since a) they’re valuable, and b) still not taxable, since for a 10 year whisky the accumulated angel’s share would be ~20% and nobody wants to pay taxes on stuff lost to the textbook definition of an act of god.)
Stuff [14] enters the cask to replace the lost whisky, adding stuff [15]. Sometimes there’s another barrel/cask used, typically Spanish sherry, for finishing. Sometimes it just goes straight to the bottle, from which everyone drinks the stuff [16] and is happy.
1. water, barley, yeast, and heat
2. barley
3. peat
4. barley
5. mill
6. water
7. wort
8. yeast
9. …or merely blind you.
10. wash
11. aka the head, aka the dangerous part
12. aka the feints
13. barrels
14. air
15. character
16. Scotch
petroglyphs.JPG
Sign coming into Edinburgh: “No hard shoulder next 150 yards.” I expect if I’d looked backwards it would have said “No hard shoulder next 1362 miles.” (It should have.)
malt_floor.JPG
My hiking boots have been fully peated. The nose is awful.

Book Tour: Two Photos

What is a book tour like? It’s like this.

Sublime…

Feynman Diagram PretzelsSusan Hwang’s Feynman Diagram Pretzels

…and mundane…

Drying Socks
Self-portait with drying sock

“Get a heat”

greenpoint

The last couple of weeks found me in the Abandoned Warehouse District of Brooklyn (you know the one — it’s where all the superhero vs. supervillain battles take place in 1960s Marvel Comics), a bonsai artist‘s nursery in Milwaukie, Periscope Studio in Portland, Gas Works Park in Seattle, an unnamed and snowy trail near Mt. Rainier, and, finally, TLC Forge in Eatonville.

The first stop was for an unusual, whirlwind, and cold freelance gig which I don’t think I can talk about yet, and the rest were mostly pleasure with a little comics-related business mixed in for seasoning. Amy, Dan, Michael, Sara, Steve, Carolyn, Jim, Billy O. (and Neeko, Kanika and Bear), Terry, Louise, and everyone else: Thank you!

tlc forge
p.s. I didn’t correct the red-eye here because sometimes you shouldn’t.